Author : Jos Hermans
Did you miss Part One? Follow this Link
THE WAGNER WORSHIPPER
Nietzsche becomes a frequent visitor of the Wagners after his first visit to the villa in Tribschen near Lucerne on Whit Monday of 1869. In the spotlight of Wagner's dazzling personality, whose fame is in the zenith at the time, the 24-year-old philology professor's surrender is total. He spends Christmas there, witnesses the birth of Siegfried, and makes himself useful by running all kinds of errands for the Wagners. It should be noted that he was always very warmly received by the Wagners in Tribschen.
While the Bayreuth project is taking shape, Wagner makes Nietzsche part of his plans: "I have no one now with whom I could cooperate as seriously as with you - with the exception of the One and Only (...) You could now relieve me of much, even half, of my fate. And with that you might fully fulfill your purpose (...) Now then, show what philology is capable of and help me bring about the great Renaissance" (12.02.1870).
It must have been a signal of extraordinary significance to Nietzsche; an invitation that must have flattered him immensely and which, moreover, came at just the right time. Nietzsche offers his services unconditionnaly and even declares that he is prepared to give up his professorship in Basel in order to devote himself, as it were, to the Bayreuth cause: "As far as Bayreuth is concerned, I have thought that the best thing for me to do would be to stop my professorship for a few years and to join the pilgrimage to the Fichtel mountains. These are expectations that I would like to see fulfilled." ( Letter to Cosima, 19.06.1870).
The Wagners in no way encourage him to take this step. Do they want to protect the young professor from existential uncertainty?
At Christmas 1870, Nietzsche had witnessed Wagner's gesture of surprising his wife on her birthday with the Siegfried idyll. A year later, Nietzsche wanted to repeat the feat and he sent Cosima a composition of his own, "Nachklang einer Sylvesternacht," for piano four hands. There can be no doubt about it: he wants to surprise, to astonish, to be recognized as a composer, and by dedicating the work to Cosima he wants to safeguard himself from criticism. It turns out to be a salto mortale. He sends the gift by mail and does not show up at the birthday party despite the warm invitation of the Wagners. Tension had by now given way to anticipatory fear. In Tribschen, the composition is ridiculed and when the Wagners' reply is polite but evasive, Nietzsche understands that he is not taken seriously as a composer. This is where the trampling of his ego begins. That his self-confidence is nevertheless remarkable is shown by the boldness with which he places his birthday present, as it were, next to Wagner's from the year before, thus exposing his Sylvester Night to comparison with the Siegfried Idylle.
"Die Geburt der Tragödie" appears on January 2, 1872. Nietzsche sends Wagner a copy and in the accompanying letter he writes: "Meanwhile I feel with pride that I have been marked and that people will now always mention me in a relation to You." Wagner, for his part, is over the moon with the book : "This is the book I have so longed for!" (CT 6.01.1872). Nietzsche considers the book to be his entrance into the avant-garde of the Bayreuther Festspiele, on which he has by now placed all his hopes for his own future.
He is eager to involve his friends in his plans. "I have made an alliance with Wagner. You cannot imagine how close we are now and how our plans touch" (Letter to Rohde, 28.01.1872). "Remember that we are both called to fight and work for a cult movement among the privileged, which perhaps in the next generation, perhaps even later, will be shared with the greater masses." (Letter to Gersdorff, 4.02.1872)
However, he has not yet forgotten the rejection of his Sylvester Night. In mid-April he sends the Manfred Meditation, a reworking of the Sylvester Night, to his publisher Ernst Wilhem Fritzsch who is also Wagner's publisher. To avoid having his opinion shaped by Wagner, he says that the work came from his friend George Chatham. The hope of getting it printed, in response to the contempt he experienced from Tribschen, ultimately fails due to disinterest on the part of the publisher.
FAREWELL TO TRIBSCHEN
In April 1872, the Wagners leave for their new home in Bayreuth. On parting with Tribschen, Nietzsche writes: "These three years, which I spent in the vicinity of Tribschen, and to which I made 23 visits - what do they not mean to me! What would I be if they were missing me! I am happy to have immortalized this world for myself in my book (Der Geburt der Tragödie)" (Letter to Gersdorff, 1.5.1872). Sixteen years later, in Ecce Homo, he will still think back to these days with melancholy.
On May 22, 1872, the foundation stone of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth is laid. Nietzsche experiences the event as a magnificent prelude to his own future. Wagner allowed him to be the center of attention. On the return trip from the Green Hill to the city, he is allowed to take a seat in Wagner's carriage: he is none other than "the second man of the first hour."
On May 30, a scathing critique of "Die Geburt der Tragödie" by the young Jewish philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff appears in the journal Zukunftsphilologie. Nietzsche's disposition for malice manifests itself immediately : "What an overconfident, Jewish sickly fellow" he writes to Gersdorff and he hopes that "Wilamowitz will bear the mark of this to the end of his days". Among his professional colleagues he is now known as Wagner's literary lackey.
Wagner comes to his aid via an open letter in the Noorddeutschen Allgemeinen Zeitung (12.6.1872). In it Wagner affirms before the eyes of the whole world that Nietzsche will help to bring about the "great Renaissance" and places on his shoulders the task of a national educational reform (Bildungsreform). In his June 24 reply, Nietzsche thanks his mentor with the solemnity of an anointed one.
In July 1872 Nietzsche writes : "For a higher treatment I must become more mature and try to educate myself - ah, such a good resolution! But what can I accomplish on my own! Some day I must flee to Bayreuth, to Your nearness, as the true 'educational institution'." In Wahnfried, these allusions can hardly be misunderstood. But the Wagners, with the best will in the world, would not have been able to give Nietzsche's idealistic vocation a real basis in Bayreuth and provide him with a bearable existence in their environment.
However, he did not put aside his musical ambitions. On July 20, 1872, he sends his Manfred to Hans von Bülow, at that time the most important conductor of his time. He hopes to get more positive advice here than from the Wagners but gets a kick in the stomach. The always straightforward von Bülow destroys his composition denouncing it as a "rape of Euterpe" : "Your Manfred-Meditation is the most extreme of fantastic extravagance, the most unpleasant and anti-musical that I have come across in notes on music paper for a long time. Several times I had to ask myself: is it all a joke, was the intention perhaps to make a parody of the so-called music of the future?"
It cannot be otherwise than that Nietzsche must have deeply affected by this rejection and he promises never to write music again. Two months later he does it again and starts composing the "Hymne an die Freundschaft". He will offer his Manfred to the Swiss conductor Friedrich Hegar and the composer Hans Huber. In both cases nothing comes of it.
He continues involving his friends in his grand plans for Bayreuth. To Erwin Rohde he writes about "how we could build a material foundation and pedestal for you (...) What do you think, among other things, about a rectorate in Bayreuth?" Moreover, perhaps "an editor's salary of about 2,000 Thl can be determined in the establishment of the journal long planned by Wagner and me, in which practically, by way of example, the possibility of a high quality and thoroughly respectable, truly instructive cultural newspaper should be proved." Here he is referring to the Bayreuther Blätter. To Malwida von Meysenbug he writes at the end of February 1873 : "At some point we will all be in Bayreuth and will no longer understand how it was possible to live elsewhere."
As the first of the "Unzeitgemäβe Betrachtungen", the text "David Strauss, der Bekenner und Schriftsteller" emerges. The text is of a malice that foreshadows the later attacks on Wagner. It signifies his complete break with Christianity but he is in fact attacking a kindred spirit. He does it to gain favor with Wagner. That Nietzsche allowed himself to be mobilized against a fellow freethinker, out of devotion to Wagner, whom he will later accuse of the mortal sin of having succombed to Christianity : he may forgive himself this hypocrisy - but will he also forgive Wagner, in whose interest he became involved?
In his letter on the Master's birthday, May 22, 1873, Nietzsche again pulls out all the stops: "What would we be if we could not have you, and what would I be, for example, no more than a stillborn creature! I always shudder at the thought that I could have lain down without You : and then life really would not have been worth living."
THE COVERT HERETIC
In the fall of 1873, the Bayreuth undertaking again needs money. At the request of Emil Heckel, Nietzsche designs a "Mahnruf an die Deutschen." Wagner doubts the effect of Nietzsche's design and leaves it to the general assembly of patrons and Wagner societies to approve it. They reject it and Professor Adolf Stern is asked to brew a new text. Nietzsche must have felt quite bruised by this rejection, a humiliation he will never forgive. Certainly not when it turns out that Stern's appeal remains unsuccessful and no one thinks of getting his own text out again.
In early 1874, the Bayreuth project comes to a halt. King Ludwig II is unwilling to guarantee a loan. The venture is in the red. The project seems destined to fail. What does Nietzsche do? He begins to list for himself all the reasons for the failure and finds one culprit: Wagner. In the Colli-Montinari edition there are 30 pages about this.
"The music is not worth much, neither the poetry nor the drama." About the composer of Rienzi and Holländer, he notes, "None of our great musicians was such a bad musician as Wagner at 28" and he doubts "whether Wagner has any musical talent". About Tristan, which he always adulated, he now writes : "Excesses in Tristan of the most alarming kind". And the fight scene in Die Meistersinger contains "all the roughness of the German (...) In the service of the gestures of Hans Sach the music must surely degenerate". For "new music" Wagner is "totally insensitive." He allows no individuality other than his own and that of his confidants. He attempts tyranny with the help of the theatrical masses. "Wagner is not a reformer, because until now everything has remained the same." One can read between the lines : there must be a new reformer. For example, out of Basel.
The prospect of a stage place alongside Wagner at the Festival had hitherto forced him to endure personal antipathies, to keep silent or suppress critical objections. Having given up his hopes in the spring of 1874, as he confesses to Rohde afterwards on February 19, and freed from such considerations, the misgivings emerge all the more sharply in his notebook.
Nietzsche does not keep his critical notes to himself. He lets Gersdorff know that he has a "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth" in the pipeline. So the text already has a title. As is well known, it is the same title that Nietzsche will later give to his festive address. Thus he has created the common misconception that the attacks of 1874 were already preparatory work for the festive address. It contains only negative keywords.
On February 20, however, King Ludwig gives the go-ahead and Bayreuth is saved. Wagner, who suspects nothing of Nietzsche's secret betrayal, writes on 27.02.1874: "In a nutshell, I would have had only one thing to say to you, namely, that I am very proud to have nothing more to say and to be able to leave everything else to you (...) All will be well with my great affair, which will probably begin in 1876. Full rehearsals next year already (...) In May our house will be finished: your room will be ready by then."
What does Nietzsche do? He puts aside all the ammunition, which he has collected against Wagner, and concentrates back on his assignment in Bayreuth !
Wagner must have been made aware of Bülow's castrating reaction to Nietzsche's composition and seems to realize how dead serious Nietzsche is about his music. Replying to one of Nietzsche's depressing letters he writes : "I think you should marry or compose an opera; the one would help you as much and as badly as the other. But I think marriage is better (...) What Satan has made you a pedagogue?" (6.04.74)
Nietzsche replicates with a display of hypocrisy: "It is an incomparable happiness for one who gropes and stumbles in dark and strange paths, to be led gradually to the light, as you have done with me; therefore I cannot but revere you as a father (...) Since I know that in Bayreuth the mountain has been conquered - the first months of this year were terrible to behold from afar - the midnight and the worries are over, and now everything goes to the light." (20.05.1874)
And he does not fail to remind Wagner of his mission : "Surely it would not alarm you if one day I could not stand it any longer at the university, in the strange scholarly air? I keep thinking (...) of independence under the most modest circumstances."
How strongly he counts on his assignment at Bayreuth betrays a letter to his sister (26.1.1875) in which he writes : "what numerous obligations I shall have in the future towards the Wagner family." The partnership with Wagner he sees only as a stepping stone to self-liberation, to a spiritual and existential independence - finally also as an inner liberation from Wagner.
But he waits in vain for a concrete proposal from Wagner to cooperate in Bayreuth. In his third Unzeitgemäβe Betrachtungen "Schopenhauer als Erzieher" he describes a vision of the task Wagner had once assigned him. The Wagners praise the book and thank him for it but that is all.
IRRITATIONS IN WAHNFRIED
In August 1874, during a 101-day visit to Wahnfried, serious dissonance ensues. First he begins to speak Latin instead of German. Then he forces Brahms' Triumph Song on his host. After only a few measures, Wagner angrily storms out of the room. When Nietzsche biographer Curt Janz believes of this event that "suddenly the master stood stripped of all majesty and grandeur like a jealous little despot, not strong enough to appreciate the skill of another," he forgets that Wagner had to allow himself one of Brahms' weakest works here, a work that Brahms himself had called another "Schnaderhüpferl."
Nietzsche parries Wagner's outburst with outward equanimity. He merely looks at Wagner with astonishment and modest dignity, which, according to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, will later tempt Wagner to remark, "I would give a hundred thousand marks at once if I had such a beautiful attitude as this Nietzsche, always distinguished, always dignified, such a thing is very useful in the world."
Nietzsche must also have submitted his "Hymnus an die Freundschaft," to which a disapproving judgment from Wagner must have followed. In a letter to Felix Mottl, Cosima would later claim, "With Ein Hymnus an die Freundschaft, the rupture actually began."
In the face of all this obstinately exhibition of musical taste, Wagner must have had doubts about whether Nietzsche was the right partner for him. In early May 1875, Nietzsche wrote to his mother and sister, "The piano score of Götterdämmerung has appeared in the bookstore, I have already taken a look at it. It is heaven on earth."
On the first page of a new notebook, opened in the summer of 1875, Nietzsche writes: preparatory work for 'Richard Wagner in Bayreuth'. Only now, mind you, does he begin the notes for his festive address. The disparaging potpourri of the spring of 1874 now disappears into the drawer; none of it appears in the festive address. He takes up the same title again - but this time not as a mocking obituary, but as a victory fanfare.
In August 1875, the first rehearsals of the Festival begin. Nietzsche struggles with severe headaches and regrets not being able to attend. Suddenly, he can also reconcile himself with Wagner's music again. In his notes, written after the rehearsals and in preparation for 'Richard Wagner in Bayreuth' we read: "He has achieved what no one has ever achieved before: the strongest and clearest language of feeling. (...) It is as if before his orchestra no orchestra has existed. (...) All predecessors are dilettantes compared to him, even Beethoven. I do not know in what way I have ever been able to experience the purest sunny happiness than through Wagner's music."
In another note he sketches the outlines of his future Forum : "Future of Bayreuth summers : Unity of all truly living people : Artists bring their art, writers their works, reformers their new ideas; a general bath for the soul : there the new genius awakens, there a kingdom of goodness unfolds."
Nietzsche thinks he is close to his goal and no longer sees himself as a henchman but as an equal partner of the Master. He not only wants to become as great as Wagner, he wants to stand on his shoulders. Wagner's prophet is ready to be the Messiah. Nietzsche's vision of Bayreuth is "his" Forum, an imaginary auditorium, from which he can henceforth send his "Reden an die Menschheit" into the world. That Nietzsche's expectations are not entirely illusory is proven by the following diary extract from Cosima: "More and more we, R. and I, are thinking about the question of education; thoughts of founding a model school, with Nietzsche, Rohde, Overbeck, Lagarde. Whether the support of the king can be obtained for this?..."
Wagner has thus not forgotten the task he once gave Nietzsche. There is no evidence that he informed Nietzsche of this. Perhaps he did not want to raise false hopes because financial support was not to be expected from Munich. We can estimate Wagner's condition from the deficit that the first Festival will cause: about 850,000 euros, for which Wagner himself will have to bear the legal responsibility. In Wahnfried one is realistic enough to see that the idea of a model school is hopeless. Wagner and Cosima give up on the idea. It seems that the Wagners did not inform Nietzsche of these considerations. In mid-May 1876, Nietzsche writes to Carl Fuchs, "With restored hope all the old plans and resolutions are coming back which are more difficult for me to renounce than life itself" and to Rohde "My work, for which I am gathering all my strength, is the month in Bayreuth."
Barely 4 weeks before the opening of the Festspiele, he writes enthusiastically to Gersdorff: "Freedom! (...) Yesterday Wagner wrote me a long letter, to make me proud and happy, as far as I am concerned" (26.5.1876). In the meantime, he finished the festive address "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth".
THE FESTIVE ADDRESS OF AN UNBELIEVER
"Richard Wagner in Bayreuth" is the fourth volume of the Unzeitgemäβe Betrachtungen and Nietzsche's last writing before the literary reckoning. It appeared just before the opening of the first Festival, in July 1876. It is full of hyperboles and apt formulations that are among the best of his prose.
At first Nietzsche wants to convince Wagner that he is his congenial prophet. And in numerous passages he undoubtedly is. The text is full of allusions to his mission, and he ends with an unmistakable message for Wagner: "What Wagner will be to this people: - Something he cannot be to all of us, namely not the seer of a future, as he would like to present himself to us, but the interpreter and reformer of a past." If Wagner is not the seer, then who is? Who else but Nietzsche?
What Wagner had already offered in 1871 but had to shelve, Nietzsche now takes into his own hands: he bluffs his right as a designed partner, he defines the Bayreuth competences: the art and the past for Wagner, the education and the future for Nietzsche.
Of the cover letter with which he intends to announce the book in Wahnfried, he writes three versions in mid-July 1876. These contain new allusions but he flinches at his own feigned hubris and finally sends a fourth watered-down version. Wagner is delighted with the text and responds with "Friend! Your book is wonderful! Where did you get this experience of me?". Cosima notes, " A wonderful text by Nietzsche: R. Wagner in Bayreuth".
Source: Manfred Eger, Nietzsches Bayreuther Passion, Rombach Litterae, 2001